He threw down the wall and was captured; today is a “brilliant mind” and Brad Pitt will be filming his story

Alfredo Quiñones Hinojosa – the protagonist of this interview with Infobae – said “yes” to Plan B Entertainment, the producer of Brad Pitt. Known in the world as Dr. Q., is Mexican and was fed up with movies always showing them like this: “Narcos, criminals,” parasites with inferior intelligence than those who better brake with a wall.

His is the story of a poor, undocumented immigrant who trained physically and mentally and one day took a career and climbed that wall, and now he lives to open brains and remove tumors with the precision with which he deactivating a bomb is considered one of the “bright minds” of the world. Another story that shows there are other stories.

jump

Dr. Q. sits punctually in front of the camera at home in Jacksonville, Florida. He is dressed, in a red tie, and on his desk there are no papers but skulls. He is a neurosurgeon, is the director of neurosurgery at the Mayo Clinic -considered the best in the world- and is the protagonist of one of the chapters of a series of Netflix and the -called Asos of the scalpel ). He is a man who believes that in strong minds, the same as asking for a second, he interrupts the interview, and gets up to see why Rocky and Apollo are barking.

“Now I look at it again and I ask myself ‘how can it be possible that I jumped this wall?’. At that time I was about 7 or 8 meters tall and on top I had these barbed wires. designed logically to hurt, so that you get stuck. Also so that people don’t get encouraged, ”he explains to Infobae. It refers to the wall separating Mexico from the United States, which he decided to jump – for the first time – when he was 19 years old.

Little Alfredo had been born in a village in Mexicali, very close to the border with the United States. Her mother was just over a teenager, and at home there was not just drinking water. “At a very early age my little sister died. From poverty, dehydration, diarrhea,” she explains. Maricela was a baby, and her parents’ lack of education prevented them from realizing in time what was happening to her.

During his childhood in Mexico. He was the eldest of five brothers

But what the eldest of the five brothers did not have in particular was in his mind: “I imagined that he was traveling to the stars, that he was disappearing or that he was flying. Notice that he always imagined that the barriers did not exist,” he points out. that you are not talking about the wall or brain tumors, you are already talking about the wall and brain tumors.

“At the same time I had incredible nightmares, in which despite all these powers I could not save my parents, my siblings, my grandparents, from these things that attacked us humans. I think that’s the reason why that I continue to fight to find a cure for cancer and support a foundation along with the four or five most famous neurosurgeons in the world, to help poor people who don’t have access to neurosurgeons like me or my colleagues. ”

“I had incredible nightmares in which I could not save my family from these things that attacked us,” he recalls (Photo: Clínica Mayo)

He was 14 and already studying to be a teacher when he started training to jump. “It wasn’t like the wall of Germany, it didn’t have bricks. I looked to the horizon and imagined what life was waiting for him on the other side of people like us: poor people, humble people. Because it wasn’t just a physical barrier, it was a symbolic barrier. This barrier has never been forgotten for me, it is the barriers that I also have today in my work as a neurosurgeon. “

He was about to turn 19 when he said goodbye to his family, went to the border, took a career block, ran, stuck his fingers in the trellis, climbed the wire, dodged the barbed wire roll sharp and pulled to the other side: Calexico, United States.

“But they caught me,” he says, and dry-cuts the flow of adrenaline. He has since become accustomed to fighting seemingly impossible obstacles, such as “a dragon,” he says on the Netflix series as a brain tumor is removed: “a dragon whose head is cut off and two come out.”

This is now the border wall in El Paso, Texas, USA, seen from the Mexican side of the border in Ciudad Juárez (Reuters / José Luis González)

He was lucky, because they kept him detained for only one day and sent him back to Mexico. But Alfredo came back, studied the passage of the immigration patrol, timed the time he had between one round and another, climbed back up, jumped, fell on the other side, and ran.

This is how he entered the United States: dirty, poor, undocumented, lonely.

“Being afraid has helped me a lot. I was afraid of breaking the wall at that time, afraid of failing. I’m still afraid today every time I go into surgery, afraid of failing my patients, notice that neurosurgeons walk by a very finite line between life and death, but I have managed not to paralyze this fear, but to result in something much more powerful: the ability to concentrate on fighting the adverse things, the things that people says we can’t change “.

On the other hand

“Sure, today you look at me here in my office, with my tie, my skulls on the desk … but yes there were many days when I lay in bed crying because I left everything: my family , to my parents, to my siblings, to my uncles, grandparents, friends, everything, everything, everything.For many years I decided not to look back.I don’t regret anything, but I know it was a lot of sacrifices to change that destination .Those who think there is no price to be paid to be able to succeed are in the wrong. “

He is now the head of neurosurgery at what is considered the best hospital in the world (Gentilesa Clínica Mayo)

As a temporary agricultural worker, his job was to remove weeds from cotton fields and harvest tomatoes: from sun to sun — hands in raw flesh — for $ 3.5 an hour.

“I worked in the field with my hands, the same hands I do surgery with now,” he says proudly, shows them to the camera, and makes the gesture of what a beautiful little hand I have. “He was dirty, he slept in a mobile home, he was very poor, undocumented. The hardest thing about being an immigrant is this: being invisible.”

It was the answer given by his cousin when Alfredo told him that he wanted to go to school to study English which ended up ejecting him. “What are you talking about?” He replied, pointing to the field. “This is your future. We have come here as laborers and we are lucky to have a job,” Dr. Q in the series. “I felt like they were burying a dagger in my brain,” he says to Infobae now, “although he’s making the gesture of something sticking in his heart – and they’re doing it to me like that,” he twists.

Young Alfredo left this field to clean train tanks – “to clean fish oil, which had an incredible smell of sulfur, remember that this smell is used as a symbol of hell” -, and began studying English at night in a community school. He was a welder, a butler in the railway company and, a decade after jumping the wall, became a legal citizen thanks to an immigration policy at the time. A few years later he set foot on the University of Berkeley in California.

How? Combining scholarships, work in two laboratories, the classes he taught as a teacher of chemistry, physics and mathematics and loans he applied to Government. He did the same when he entered Harvard Medical School (it was here that he was honored as a doctor), St. Francis (where he studied neurosurgery) and, when he arrived at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University. , now known in the world for its research on coronavirus.

Along with his parents

In the latter he became Professor of Neurosurgery and Oncology, Neurology and Director of the Laboratory of Brain Tumor Stem Cells.

“You can’t be Mexican, you’re too smart,” a teacher recalls, a reinforcement of the belief in lower intelligence that it’s better to brake with a wall. It was for this comment that Dr. Q spent years trying to disguise his Latin accent, which he no longer does. “Imagine me opening brains around the world. Different religions, skin colors, ideas. And the truth is that all brains are similar. We all have this amazing ability to do something to change the world.”

As recently as 2010, when he was already a world-renowned neurosurgeon and professor, he ended up paying “all the debts he had collected”: the loans he had taken to cover loans and finished paying for his education in the United States, what is today called “an investment in myself.”

He finished paying when he was about to publish his book Dr. Q: The story of how a migrant day laborer became a neurosurgeon, and when he had already been approached by Jeremy Kleiner – a 12-year-old slave producer, winner of three Oscars – to make a film about his life. Kleiner is part of the Plan B team, produced by Brad Pitt. In 2015, shortly after they began working on the script, Forbes magazine chose him as “one of Mexico’s brightest minds in the world.”

In the Netflix series he is seen trying to unwrap a tumor in the brain of a patient who had already had one the size of a grapefruit: the dragon, again, who cuts off his head and they come out two. The patient is awake, the skull open, the brain exposed: it’s like disconnecting a landmine, he explains. To disconnect the wrong cable implies, among other things, that you may have a massive heart attack right here and die. He is awake to see, live, whether what Dr. Q. touches affects his speech, his understanding of a sentence, whether he can stick out his tongue, smile.

Quiñones has written eight books on neurosurgery and there are six more to come, he has published more than 450 peer-reviewed articles and 100 book chapters, but far from distant – the idea of ​​”medical eminence” – he sees it touch the patient, support the hand on the shoulder, hug the handcuffs: so Latin. Today, he also leads research funded by the top U.S. health authority (NIH) to cure brain cancer and an NGO called Mission: BRAIN, for patients around the world who cannot afford advanced neurosurgical procedures. .

“Look, as a kid I believed a lot in superheroes and now I think my superpower isn’t what I do with my hands, it’s not what I do with my brain, but what I do with my heart to connect with the patients when I touch them, when I tell them ‘I am here with you’, I will take care of you as if you were my brother, my sister, my wife, my son, my daughter.I think at the end of the day no matter the awards, the books, the successes: at the end of the day there is nothing more powerful than giving the patient hope. “

Source: www.infobae.com